Firstly I wanted to say thank you for creating such a great piece of software!
The majority of my music collection is in FLAC but I also keep transcoded versions for use on devices with constrained storage (e.g. my phone).
What I would like to be able to do is easily sync a portion of my collection to my phone.
My plan to do this is to create a new field sync_phone=true which I can set against any albums that I want to sync to my phone. Then using the smart playlist plugin beets should automatically give me a playlist containing only the music that needs syncing and I can use clementine to sync that playlist to my phone.
However I would like the smart playlist to point to the transcoded versions of the files rather than the main FLAC copies in my library.
Hi! The only way to do that currently would be to have both versions—FLAC and transcoded—in your beets library. There’s also a third-party plugin that has a similar feel (but it’s not terribly actively maintained):
I seem to remember beets having an option to process but not create a db? If this doesn’t exist anymore, you could create a second db, include only the extensions for your transcoded music, and use smartplaylist in that instance. Does that make sense?